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A little known secret is that Mark and I were actually planning on attending Oktoberfest for the first time this year. The festival is something that has been on both of our bucket lists for many years, and it happened to overlap with the Bruins international game in Prague this year so we figured it would be the perfect trip!
Unfortunately, like everything else, COVID had other plans for us.
I was walking through Whole Foods a few weeks ago and happened to see that they had bratwurst. I personally hate bratwurst, but Mark loves it. Between his love of bratwurst and remembering that we were still technically in October, I decided to do an impromptu Oktoberfest themed date night!
Some quick basic facts about Oktoberfest:
- Oktoberfest was first started in 1810 as a celebration of the marriage of Prince Ludwig and Princess Therese. However, it wasn’t anything like we know Oktoberfest to be today. This first festival actually centered around a horse race!
- Oktoberfest traditionally starts mid-September and ends on the first Sunday of October.
- The blue and white diamond print people tend to associate with Oktoberfest actually represents the Bavarian flag.
- Why Bavaria? What even is Bavaria? Is that a country?
- I’ll be honest, one thing I have always struggled with for some reason is understanding and remembering the makeup of other countries, like the provinces in Canada and the regions vs. states in Spain, but I’ll try my best to explain Bavaria here.
Bavaria is the largest federal state in Germany. It is located in the southeast of Germany and its capital is Munich, the city where Oktoberfest is held every year.
- I’ll be honest, one thing I have always struggled with for some reason is understanding and remembering the makeup of other countries, like the provinces in Canada and the regions vs. states in Spain, but I’ll try my best to explain Bavaria here.
- Why Bavaria? What even is Bavaria? Is that a country?
- Only 6 breweries are allowed to fill steins at Oktoberfest, and those are the 6 breweries of Munich. They include:
- Augustiner
- Hacker-Pschorr
- Hofbräu
- Löwenbräu
- Paulaner
- Spaten
Dress Code
Lederhosen for men and dirndls for women, of course!
I went to three different party/costume stores looking for appropriate Oktoberfest attire, but had zero luck. I was then going to order our lederhosen and dirndl off of Amazon, but everything just looked cheap. If I’m going to invest in lederhosen and a dirndl then I want them to be nice, authentic, and something I can wear to Oktoberfests for years to come.
Enter: The aprons!
I ended up finding these AWESOME aprons that were less than $15 each. They were the perfect compromise for our lowkey, at-home date night.
You can find the lederhosen apron here and the dirndl apron here.
Setting the Mood – Decorations & Music
I don’t normally decorate too much for our date nights, but you can’t have an Oktoberfest date night without the festival atmosphere!
Because this was last minute, I had to deal with whatever decorations Amazon could get to me the next day. Honestly, while pickings were slim, what I got ended up being perfect!
Also, don’t forget your beer steins! Mark and I already had a few from various breweries, but you can always order cheaper generic ones like these.
- This set came with three tablecloths and an Oktoberfest banner, all for under $15.
- These are the flags we bought. They were about $10 and were surprisingly made of fabric instead of plastic! The shorter option is just shy of 33 feet long, which is of course ginormous, but we had no problem cutting it into shorter pieces and hanging them around our dining room.
Normally Alexa does a pretty good job coming up with an appropriate playlist when I say, “Alexa, play X music,” but she failed pretty miserably when it came to Oktoberfest music. She kept playing the chicken dance song…
I did find this perfect playlist on Spotify, though!
Menu
Beverages
Beer, of course!
Unfortunately, you can’t get beer from all six Munich breweries in America, but you can get the most important one and that is Spaten!
Why Spaten?
Since 1950, the first keg tapped to kick off Oktoberfest is always a Spaten keg in the Schottenhamel tent. So, if you can find it, make sure your first beer of the day/night is a Spaten beer!
Our selection included two beers from Munich breweries and then a handful of other Oktoberfest beers from Massachusetts. (Copper Legend by Jack’s Abbey has won multiple awards and definitely lives up to the hype, so if you’re able to get your hands on it make sure you do!)
Appetizers
You can’t have an Oktoberfest without pretzels! Mark made the pretzels and beer cheese from scratch, and they were easily the best he’s made yet!
Mark randomly got really into making pretzels around the start of quarantine, so he has almost perfected his craft at this point. He also made it a point to use an Oktoberfest beer in the beer cheese to keep it more on theme.
If you want the exact pretzel recipe he used, you can find it here. You should also be able to find boxed pretzel mix in your grocery store if that’s more your jam.
Main Course
Our main course had three things:
- Bratwurst (for Mark)
- German Potato Salad
- Käsespätzle
When planning the menu, I googled “traditional food served at Oktoberfest”. From what I found, aside from pretzels roasted chicken is actually the most common thing people eat, but that seemed boring to me and I wanted to try something new.
Enter the Käsespätzle and potato salad!
The closest thing I can compare Käsespätzle to is macaroni and cheese. I also really wanted to make the spaetzle (noodles) from scratch since I read a lot of things saying store-bought ones are no good (I also wasn’t confident I’d be able to find any).
This is the recipe I used for the spaetzle, but I’m pretty sure they came out terribly wrong! But, having never tried or seen real Käsespätzle, I had nothing to base it off of and had to hope for the best. The texture was kind of gross, but the flavors were pretty good!
The real star of the show was the potato salad! When I think of potato salad, I think of cold, mayonnaise-drenched potatoes served alongside corn on the cob, hot dogs, and burgers during the summer months. German potato salad is the polar opposite! It is served warm, no mayonnaise, and has bacon!!!
(You can find all the recipes linked above.)
Dessert
This took me the majority of the day to make because I made the pastry dough from scratch, but I actually had a lot of fun doing it! It’s a ton of work, and I definitely didn’t perfect it on my first try, but overall I was pretty impressed by my results! The hardest part was definitely rolling the dough out super thin without ripping it.
I later learned that you can also just use store-bought puff pastry dough, so if you’re not up for hours and hours of rolling dough then you can always go that route too!
Activities
Due to all the eating and drinking, I really didn’t plan much for activities. But how can you have an Oktoberfest without a beer stein holding competition???
Spoiler: I lost. It is surprisingly hard to hold a full stein straight out in front of you for an extended period of time!
For more date night at home ideas, check out a complete list here!
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